We Are Our Brothers’ Keeper - A Secret
Alliance,
By: Vartkes Yeghiayan
With a foreword by Antonia Arslan
“I read this book in one breath…this is not a novel. It
is a history of Armenians and Jews.”
The
destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War
saw the wholesale clearance of an entire people from their ancestral homeland
and the shattering of their society and culture. Massacred, uprooted from their
homes, and expelled to the deserts of Syria, the Armenians found little shelter
or comfort during the course of the deportations. But though isolated from the
world and the very powers they had once looked to as the guarantors of their
security, the Armenians were not left completely forlorn. For, despite the
wartime conditions, there remained in the Ottoman Empire a small number of
individuals still capable of giving voice to the suffering of the Armenians.
They differed in background, ranging from businessmen, diplomats from foreign
missions, to missionaries and educational instructors.
To their number is to be added Jewish men and
women living in Ottoman-controlled Palestine who took a stand against the
atrocities being committed against the Armenians. Author and attorney Vartkes
Yeghiayan has assembled a diverse array of little-known works by this small band
of Jewish men and women in Ottoman Turkey, who surreptitiously wrote about and
gathered evidence on the genocide. Included is the testimony of the American
ambassador Henry Morgenthau, a tireless champion of the Armenian cause, and
members of the NILI, the Jewish guerilla unit that worked alongside the Allied
Powers and took part in daring spy operations against the Ottomans during the
world war. Pro Armenia is the first published collection of the first-hand
testimony of these heroic Jews, preserved in memoirs, memoranda, and secret
military reports. As we seek to make sense of the tragedy, it will serve as an
important contribution to the expanding anthology of w! itness literature of the
Armenian Genocide and those that followed.
The book is available for purchase online
through our website. For more information please visit www.centerar.org and
click on publications.
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Contact:
Center for Armenian Remembrance (C.A.R.), Glendale, CA
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